Promoting positive attitudes in children towards museums and art: a case study of the use of Tate Kids in primary arts education

Charitonos, Koula
(2010).
Promoting positive attitudes in children towards museums and art: a case study of the use of Tate Kids in primary arts education.
In: Museums and the Web 2010: the International Conference for Culture and Heritage Online, 13-17 April 2010 , Denver, Colorado, USA.

Abstract

One of the challenges for museums in the Web era is to complement, enhance and extend on-site learning with on-line learning. Web statistics often indicate a high number of users of schools resources in museums’ Web sites; however, these numbers do not reveal how the resources are being used in the classroom. This paper seeks to gain a better understanding on how to support use of museums’ Web sites for learning in primary art education. It attributes specific importance to the role that museum Web sites can have in promoting positive attitudes in children towards museums and art and in particular it aims to address to what extent the use of museums’ Web resources can enhance learning and engage young people with museums. ‘Tate Kids’ (http://tate.kids.org.uk) was selected as a case study and its Online Collection was explored by two Year 5 classes in a primary school located in greater London. Evidence from the case study suggests that the use of an art museum Web site was beneficial for learning in art and influenced positively children’s attitudes towards art and museums.
It is argued that positive attitudes towards art and museums, as well as ‘interpretive skills,’ are critical for children in experiencing meaningful art museum on-line visits and in getting engaged with the museum.